Alice Hargrave (lives Chicago, IL) received a BA from Tulane University, New Orleans and an MFA from University of Illinois, Chicago. Her work has been exhibited widely and internationally, most recently in Lianzhou, China. Her monograph Paradise Wavering (Daylight Books, 2016) and its extensive solo exhibition traveled to multiple venues, including Pictura Gallery, Bloomington, IN; Gallery 555, Boston; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO; and University Galleries at Illinois State University, Normal. Group exhibitions include both national and international venues, such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography and Smart Museum of Art, both Chicago; Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; as well as Art Metz, France. Hargrave has been honored with several awards and is in permanent collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Artist Book Collection, Hyatt Corporation, Museum of Contemporary Photography and Ruttenberg Collection, all Chicago as well as the Nuveen Corporation, Radnor, PA. She was a Semifinalist in The Print Center 93rd ANNUAL International Competition and her work has been reviewed in publications including Huffington Post, BBC News and ARTNET. Formerly a full time professor at Columbia College, Chicago, Hargrave has decided to teach part time while pursuing commissions and conservation work.
Statement from the Artist:
Hargrave’s work reflects on impermanence – environmental insecurity, habitat loss and species extinctions. Working with archives in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, she creates multi-layered installations of image and sound. Often semi-transparent fabrics, each representing a different species, are hung in varying depths and layered over landscapes that she photographs where the birds used to thrive. Hargrave tones the hieroglyphic patterns of the vocalizations in bright unexpected natural hues of the species themselves, undermining that ubiquitous refrain “Why save that simple brown bird.”